Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a snake coiled around an arrow on the upper arm.

Snake coiled around an arrow on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A snake with a spotted, stippled body coils around a vertical arrow, its head at the top left and its tail curling at the bottom. The outline is bold and black, and dense dotwork shading gives the snake's body texture, while the arrow has solid black shaft and fletching. The design is rendered only in black and grey on the upper arm against plain skin.

Dotwork Upper arm Snake Arrow Fletching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wasps find the windfalls before you do, so by the third week of August you walk the orchard rows with your eyes on the grass. Hollis Pike has tended the Coldharbour trees for forty years and has never let you pick an apple off the ground with bare fingers, not since an adder came out from under the cider press and bit his dog. You are sixteen and you think it is an old man's fable. You say so, and he hands you the long-handled picker and tells you to mind your feet.

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Up on the ridge the bowyer's shed still smells of linseed and yew. Hollis brings down a shaft he has been seasoning, straight as a rule, and fletches it with three goose feathers dyed the colour of rust. He says an arrow wants something to aim at, and a snake wants something to wind about, and between the two a man learns to hold still. He leans the finished shaft against the orchard gate, and the afternoon light lies across it in bars.

When the dog came home limping that week, you found the snake coiled round the arrow, its speckled body wrapped three times, its head raised as if it were the one taking aim. You did not touch it. You ran back for the old man. He looked at it a long while, then said the snake had chosen the arrow, not the other way round, and walked off whistling for the dog.

The next morning the arrow was gone from the gate and the wasps were back on the windfalls. You picked up every apple with the long picker and left the dog in the shade, where the adder would not think to follow.